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':: , (Ä ': :: . t', .: ", '"Du Pont registered trademark Du Pont makes fibers, not fabrics or clothes the deliberately dehumanized aestheti- cism of minimal art is summed up by another of its practitioners, T adaakJ Kuwayama: "Ideas, thoughts, philoso- phy, reasons, meanings, even the h u- manity of the artist do not enter into my work at al1. There is only the art itself. That is al1." The attempt to cut art down to the bare bones of its material elements is a recurrent recourse of artists in the con- fusion of a changing culture. Accord- ing to a celehrated anecdote, Mallarmé once advised Degas that poems were made of words, not ideas. Most sig- nificant painting (though not all) since Matisse's "J oie de Vivre" (1905-06) has been reductive. Reductivism does not belong to anyone style; it is as operative in painting conceived as a gesture as in painting cut down to a line or a square. The traditional aim of reduction, however, even at its most extreme, has he en to augment through compression the emotional or intellec- tual statement. In slicing away resi- dues of imager} or manner that hd ve lost their relevance, the artist seeks, as a European writer recently put it, to transform the apple into a diamond. The novelty of the new minimalism lies not in its reductionist techniques but in its principled determination to purge painting and sculpture of any but formal experiences, and even of resonances of experience. There is left the void-not Yves Klein's empty sky (though formalist critics have not been slow to link IKB mono- chromes with the red or white "color fields" of the minImalists) but empty art, correct and clean. It is a void that seeks the cancellation of art a" it has been until now and its supplanting by works from which adulterating im- pulses have been purged. The inspiration of the minimasters is art criticism; many of these painters and sculptors began as writel s on art. Describing a recent minimal exhi- bition, a reviewer noted that of the artists represented "four at least have been fairl} systematically engaged in critical writing." The rigor of the engIneering concept is cOlnplemented by a polemical intensity through which runs the vein of a moral cru- sade against romanticism and impu- rit) . Regardless of formal resemblances, the true historical background for this approach is not the tradition of the pure colorists and geometncIans- Malevich, Mondrian, Albers-but the " , ___ 0 , \ 'I ,I Dada assault on art, here mistaken for a return to aesthetic fundamentals. If \Varhol's Brillo boxes are Dada, the boxes without Brillo of Robert Morns, the most subtle of the mini- Inalist dialecticians, are super-Dada. The point is reInforced by the practice of many of the primary-structure mclk- ers of having their ideas ("Ideas . . . do not enter into my work at aU") executed in carpentry or Inachine shops, while others advertise as a radi- cal departure that the} nail their pieces together themselves. Ohviollsly, serious intellectual re- sponse to WOI ks of this kind, as to those of Klein and Grooms clnd light-and- filnl spectacles, depends upon the col- lusion of the art world in accepting them as phenomena retinted in tll e vat of art history. "Tithout the omnipres- ent memory of Dada, nothing could induce the celebration as a new "ad- vance" in art of ReInhardt's hlack squares, with their dead, fish-eye glint, or the painted planks and stair steps at the \Vhitney. T HE difference between historic Dada and the current fundamen- talist version lies in their treatment of the spectator; instead of goading him into indignation at the desecration of art, the new Dada converts him into an aesthete. The monotonous shapes and bleak surfclces presented to him as ob- jects wrapped in their own being com- pel hÌ1n, if he is not to back out of the gallery, to simulate a pro- fessional sensitivity to ab- struse contrasts of tone, light, and dimension. The more a work IS purged of ". . I " h 1 InessentIa s t e c oser the scrutiny required to " ". d } see It an t le Inore precious the sensibilIty re- quired to reelct to it. i\. reviewer of paintings con- sIstIng of a few large forms recently put the matter in bl un t terms : "To ap- preciate this difference [in the thickness of their contours] fully it is necessary to get very close to these sizable can- vases and examine them as if for black- heads." Similarly, the author of the Jewish Museuln catalogue for the Reinhardt exhibition complains that, as a result of "overlighting" the gallery, "noses and fingers are rubbed against the surfaces [of the paintings] . . . the impatient viewer sees nothing immedi- ately and feels constrained to touch in- stead of look." (i\.pparently, thIs over- stin1lrlated critic has not consIdered McLuhan's theSIS that ovel-all paintIng I " .AA